LINGUIST List 11.2773

Thu Dec 21 2000

All: New LINGUIST Services, and LSA Office Hours

Editor for this issue: Anthony Rodrigues Aristar <aristarlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. linguist, New LINGUIST Services, and LSA Office Hours

The LINGUIST crew will be holding 'office hours' Jan 5 and 6 at the
annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. If you're at the
convention, please stop by! We'd love to meet you and hear any
comments you may have about LINGUIST. We [HAD & AA] would also like
to introduce our excellent student crew. If you have appreciated
their hard work this year--as we certainly have! -- please take a
moment to stop by and make their acquaintance.

And, if you'll drop by, we have a holiday gift for you--a second
holiday gift, actually, since we have a "Christmas present" for all of
our subscribers in this message. (Read on...)

Last year at this time we told you about our initiative to archive
multiple linguistics- and language-related mailing lists on our site.
Our plan was to set up one central site where almost all of the lists
relevant to the discipline will be available. We've been moving
steadily ahead with this project. We now archive 80 linguistics
lists, which you can see at the URL:

	http://linguistlist.org/list-archives.html 

And the first "Christmas present" we have to give is the URL of our
new multi-list search engine:

	http://listserv.linguistlist.org/multilist/searchall.html

Now you can search all 80 lists, or a subset thereof, with a single
search command, tracking down in one operation all mailing list
postings relevant to your research. With a second click, you can see
the results in a 5-line context. Try it out! And if you like it,
please thank Sudheendra Adiga, the programmer who designed and
implemented the facility while he was a graduate student at Wayne
State University. Sudhi's email is <sudhilinguistlist.org> and we
know he would appreciate feedback.

Work on the archive project continues in tandem with the database
project described below, and other enhancements will be announced in
2001. Please help us spread the word about the archive to other list
owners who might wish to participate. Joining the archive will entail
no extra work on the listowner's part, nor will they have to change
the way their list is run or where it is distributed from. All that is
required is the listowner's permission to subscribe our site to their
list.
	
Our second ongoing project is to restructure the site as a database
and produce a single search facility which ranges over ALL the
information on the LINGUIST site. We are categorizing all the
information we store by linguistic subfield and language treated
(where relevant), so that anyone working on, say, Russian syntax,
would be able to type in either "Russian" or "syntax" and access at
one click all the dissertation abstracts, book or journal
announcements, calls for papers, course syllabi, names of linguists or
programs specializing in these areas, etc., which are listed on the
LINGUIST site. When it's complete, you'll even be able to search by
linguistic subgroup. This is a big project to implement--particularly
with our small team--so it won't be finished for quite some time. But
when it's done we hope you will agree that the usefulness of LINGUIST
has been dramatically enhanced.

If you'd like to speed these projects along, remember that it's your
donations that pay for the staff we need. If you are now making
year-end, pre-tax charitable donations, please consider clicking on
http://linguistlist.org/donation.html and making a contribution.
LINGUIST List is a non-profit organization, and your donations are
tax-deductable.

And--oh yes--what was that second holiday gift? Well it's another
URL--for a facility we're calling "Search the Linguistic Web." When
finished, it will allow you to search all and only linguistics-related
sites on the Internet. It's not quite ready for prime-time yet, but
it you'll stop by during our office hours at the Linguistic Society of
America meeting, you can have the URL and become a beta-tester.

We will be in the Cherry Blossom Room Friday, 5 January, 2:00 - 3:00
PM and Saturday, January 6 from 9:00- 10:00 AM We hope to see you
then.
	
Have a good New Year!
	
Anthony, Helen, Andrew